They tried pitching it full, they tried pitching it short. They went off-side, they went on-side. The straight yorker, the wide yorker and of course the bouncer. The boundary fielders were shifted after almost every delivery they bowled to him. But the result was the same almost every single time. The ball either sped to the fence or soared into the crowd. For, the ball, the bowler and probably everything else at the Wankhede Stadium were all just incidental to the blitzkrieg attack that Suresh Raina had launched on Kings XI Punjab.

For those 37 outrageous minutes on Friday night, there was only one man who seemed to be playing cricket. The rest were fetching balls.

Raina was wielding his bat like a man possessed. Yes, we had seen the Maxwells and the Millers break new horizons in terms of boundary-hitting previously in the tournament. Just an hour earlier in fact, Virender Sehwag had lit the IPL alive with an incredulously breathtaking century. But this was an assault like none seen before, and not just by IPL standards. This was carnage.

Six overs, 100 runs

There were drives, cuts, pulls, inside-out hits, flicks, slog-sweeps and clean hits that cleared the sight-screen with the bat coming down on the ball like a rapier on each occasion. If the Punjab bowlers were left stupefied, they weren’t the only ones. Close to 35,000 just sat gaping in awe and in utter disbelief. Few even noticed the scoreboard or the fact that Chennai were closing in on a century within the first half-dozen overs.

By the end of the sixth over, in which 33 runs came off Awana’s bowling, Raina had single-handedly scored more runs in a powerplay than any team had managed to previously in the history of the IPL. He had smashed 18 boundaries off the 25 deliveries bowled to him. And he had smashed 87 out of the 100 that Chennai had scored in their first six in pursuit of an improbably 227. If anything, Raina seemed to be taking them there in double-quick time.

Then Raina was out. Against the run of play, and in the most anti-climactic of fashions. First ball after the Strategic Time-Out was taken at the end of the sixth over, Brendon McCullum called for a single after pushing the ball in the covers. Then he hesitated and ran. The pause was enough for George Bailey to pick up the ball,